


Buckshot

by mad_mary_kidd (madmarykidd)



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Blood, Gen, Gore, Gunshot Wounds, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Swearing, Trypophobia, supermutants
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-12-13 18:17:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11765637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madmarykidd/pseuds/mad_mary_kidd
Summary: From the Mister In-Between universe. Just an odd scene that didn't fit into the story, but I liked it enough to rewrite it. Casey gets shot, and it's up to "Dr." MacCready to fix things, with a little help from his late wife. One-shot, trigger warnings for violence, blood and gore, and trypophobia if you think descriptions will set it off





	Buckshot

**Author's Note:**

> I've tagged this as M/M, but only because these two eventually get together in my slow-burn fic, Messin' With Mister In-Between. There's not much in this one as far as flirting or romance - apart from Casey teasing, as usual. He can't help himself. 
> 
> Just an odd scene that came to me out of nowhere, that wouldn't easily fit in Mister In-Between (which I am still working on, I promise!). Please leave me feedback if you enjoy this, and if you don't please leave me feedback and tell me why! :)

The hair stood up on the back of MacCready’s neck at the sound Casey’s agonised cry. The blast of the shotgun just before hadn’t worried him, but the cry very much did. MacCready had been travelling with Casey for weeks and he’d never heard him give so much as a grunt of pain before now, about anything. He snapped his head around to where he’d left Casey behind him, to see his friend - were they friends? MacCready thought they might be - lying on the ground with a supermutant standing over him. The dirty green face was split into a grin that managed to be vacant and cruel at the same time as its finger tightened once more on the trigger, shotgun barrel pointed not at Casey’s thigh this time but his face.

With no time to even think, never mind aim, MacCready lifted his rifle and fired. The mutant’s head and accompanying grin exploded in a shower of gore and teeth and brains, and though usually this would have been good for at least a day of crowing, right now nothing could have been further from his mind. He wanted badly to run to Casey, beneath whom a pool of his own gore was beginning to spread as he writhed in agony, but there were still other mutants up ahead and at least one of them had an assault rifle. Aware that Casey might bleed out if he didn’t help right now, and that they would likely both die if he _did_ help right now, he knew he had no choice but to make this quick.

Robert J. MacCready had never hesitated with his rifle in his hands. Ever since Little Lamplight, ever since the first time he’d picked it up, self defence and the defence of his friends had come naturally. Gun battles didn’t frighten him. It wasn’t hesitation that delayed him now, but having to force his breathing back under control. He knew if he shot like this he would miss, and that every missed shot gave away his position without moving him any closer to winning, and neither he nor Casey could afford that right now. But every forced breath seemed an eternity. He couldn’t remember a time when his hands had shaken like this. Except once.

Fortunately, the mutants had stopped firing - they couldn’t see MacCready, hidden as he was behind a burned out car, and Casey was clearly down, dead or dying. MacCready put his head up over the hood of the car, rifle first, easy and automatic as breathing, and squinted at the buildings up ahead.

There, in the doorway of the building opposite. He looked down the scope. His finger tightened on the trigger, not smooth like it usually did, but in a series of tiny jagged jerks. Damn adrenaline. He blew out a slow breath - and the mutant’s head exploded. The other one that had been prowling around inside looked up with a neanderthal grunt of surprise, searching for the source of the shot. Had it thought they were both gone? Mutants might be dangerous but at least they weren’t smart. His finger tightened again as the thing blundered right into his crosshairs.

The second he was sure they were all dead, he turned on his heel. “Casey!”

“Aaaaaargghhhhh…”

He would have dropped his rifle in his haste to get to Casey, except he would never do that. To leave your gun behind was to die, everyone knew that in the same way that they knew the sky was blue. It clattered instead to the dusty ground as he dropped to his knees next to his friend, within easy reach.

“Casey,” said MacCready again. “Stimpaks, where are the Stimpaks?”

“Don’t - have any,” Casey ground through clenched teeth, and the words sent a flash of hot ice over MacCready’s skin. No Stimpaks. Then where the fuck was he supposed to start with fixing all this?

“F - …” He swallowed the curse, but not for Duncan this time. Casey was already showing signs of going into shock, the last thing he needed was to see MacCready panicking. Lucy was in his head again, reciting steps; he knew this, he did. “Okay,” he said instead, forcing the hysteria not out of his voice - that would have been impossible - but at least to the back. “We have to move, it’s not safe here.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes you can,” said MacCready, not certain that Casey could. “We have to. I’m gonna tie a tourniquet first, okay?”

That was where his first sleeve had gone, months ago. Before Casey, long before then. It had saved his arm and probably his life too, but it had been easier to graft a new, different coloured one onto his beloved duster than try to rescue and reattach the old one. At least according to Arturo, to whom he had brought the thing later. MacCready couldn’t sew for shit. Besides, the old one had a stab wound in it that matched the one on his arm, and that wouldn’t heal like his arm eventually had.

Rather than try to tear through the leather of his other sleeve, he ripped off the new one; the material was thinner and would be easier to tie tightly. He did so as gently as he could, just above the wound, still wincing in sympathy as Casey gasped with the pain. Now that it was on, they had to move fast.

“Come on, buddy,” said MacCready, picking up his rifle first and slinging it over his shoulder. He pulled Casey into a sitting position, slid one hand around his back and used his knees to lift them both, cursing himself and his underground upbringing as he heaved. He’d always had this idea that if he’d grown up out in the fresh air he’d be taller, more muscular, more like Casey. But as it was, he felt like a plant that had been grown in the dark. _Weedy MacCready_ , some of the funnier Gunners had called him. Which said a lot about the others.

They stumbled and struggled under Casey’s weight, a tangled mess of shaking limbs and sweat and laboured breathing, while MacCready tried not to worry about the trail of blood they were leaving behind them. He pushed open the door to the nearest building that still had doors with his hip, relieved beyond words that that was all it took, and eased Casey in after him. Someone had camped here before - it was immediately obvious from the long-cold campfire in the middle of the room, below the gaping hole in the ceiling. There was even a sleeping bag. Whoever had been here, MacCready hoped they weren’t coming back soon. He eased Casey down onto the sleeping bag as gently as he could, trying to ignore the screaming muscles in his shoulders.

“Fuck,” said Casey, so quietly that it was as if his voice had bled out of him too. He looked green. At some point a smudge of blood had transferred to his cheek. _It’s on the wrong side of his skin_ , a voice inside MacCready’s head sang hysterically. He gagged it forcefully and looked around to see what he had to work with.

He carried a first aid kit, a promise to Lucy that he had only begun to take seriously after she died. Not because one might have helped her if he’d had it at the time - it wouldn’t have - but more because it was all he could do for her any more. That and save their son, but there was a list of other things that needed to be done first and that list had just had a pretty huge and urgent item added in right at the top. He checked the white box on the wall without much hope; empty, as he’d just known it would be. Casey didn’t have time for him to check the other buildings in what might be a fruitless search.

Okay. Old fashioned way it was, then. He walked back over to Casey and kicked at the ashes in the campfire, tamping them down. Bits of table and chair leg and old boards were strewn around the room so he used those to build and light a new fire while Casey breathed on the floor. Shallow breathing, but MacCready would take it over the other likely option. There was already a cooking pot suspended over the fire, so MacCready put his billy can in it, cracked open a can of purified water and poured it in, throwing a rag in after it.

That done, he turned his attention back to Casey - not to the wound, not immediately. He took Casey’s wrist and felt for a pulse - it fluttered like a baby bird, fast and shallow. He was going into shock. MacCready had suspected as much, and the rolling, unfocused eyes confirmed it. The fire would help but it was still low yet, so MacCready unrolled his sleeping bag from his pack and draped it over the upper half of Casey’s body; he did not protest or even seem to notice.

Now that he was doing something useful, this whole situation became - not easier to cope with, exactly, but easier to break down into chunks. Light a fire. Check for shock. Treat for shock. Remove tourniquet. Remove pants. Replace tourniquet. Clean wound. Assess damage. It said a lot that MacCready did all of these things without stumbling on ‘remove pants’.

Casey did, however. He lifted his head as MacCready began to unfasten his belt and zipper and hook his fingers into the top of the waistband, between his jeans and his underwear.

“Hey,” he said weakly, somehow still managing the ghost of a smirk. “If you wanted in my pants, you… should have just… asked,” he said slowly. MacCready frowned.

“Shut up,” he told him, while a small part was quite proud of himself for being cross rather than embarrassed. “I’m tryna help you.”

“Sorr- ah, _fuck_! S-sorry,” Casey managed, and let his head fall back to the floor again. MacCready eased Casey’s ruined pants off as gently as he could, avoiding the wound as much as possible, stopping to re-tie the tourniquet and unlace and remove Casey’s boots too.

The wound looked horrible, made worse from the fresh gouts of blood that had oozed out when he’d removed the tourniquet. It was almost enough to bring MacCready out of his world of logical steps, but there was Lucy in his head again, calm, reassuring, just the way she’d always been. _Blood always makes more of itself._ Which had meant, it always looks worse than it is. MacCready fervently hoped so. He dug around in his bag and unearthed a bottle of vodka, some of which he splashed over his hands before he began. He fished the rag out of the now boiling water with the tip of a combat knife, and waited for it to cool before using it to gently wash away the worst of the gore in his way. Casey hissed through his teeth as the rag touched the exposed meat of his thigh.

“Sorry,” said MacCready gently. Lucy had been right; with the gore mostly gone, it was clear that the wound was not one big horrible mess as he’d feared, but a series of smaller holes arranged in a rough oval, each containing a piece of buckshot. As far as that went, MacCready wasn’t sure what to hope for - ball bearings would be slippery to get hold of with tweezers, but the more usual Wasteland staple of whatever-would-fit-in-a-shotgun-cartridge would likely cause more damage on the way out. The even spread of the buckshot and the unvarying size of the holes suggested ball bearings, and as he peered closer into one of them he could see smooth silver coated in thick, liquid red. They weren’t too large, but that meant there were more of them. Still, if they had been larger and caused more damage, MacCready might now be having to contemplate the idea of amputation.

His sleeping brain was going to have a field day with that one, if he ever slept again. For now, task-orientated, logic-brain MacCready could compartmentalise it while he worked on something that did not, thankfully, involve a saw of any kind. He checked Casey’s other leg for stray buckshot, and by some miracle it looked as though there was none.

“Does it hurt anywhere else?” He asked him.

“Fuck if… fuck if I know,” Casey breathed, all previous humour gone. He seemed to be drifting in and out. MacCready would check for further damage more carefully later, once the main wound was dealt with.

“Okay.” He reached for his pack and pulled out the kit, removing tweezers, a gauze pad (far too small, but he would have to make it work) and a roll of bandage, and laying them on the sleeping bag over Casey’s belly. “This might sting a little.”

Casey didn’t reply, but he did hiss in a breath as MacCready dug for the first ball bearing, and his leg jerked violently - MacCready had anticipated that, and had held the tweezers lightly. He let them move with Casey’s leg. “Sorry, sorry,” he soothed, rubbing his other hand gently on Casey’s knee without even thinking about it. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” said Casey. “Fuck.”

“Can I start again?” MacCready asked.

“Yeah,” Casey breathed, too hurt and exhausted to make a joke. MacCready pushed the tips of the tweezers back in the hole and gripped the ball, which slipped. This was going to be a long afternoon.

There was no sound but Casey’s laboured breathing and occasional hisses, the crackle of the fire and the periodic clack of a ball bearing hitting the floor. Every so often MacCready would pause to tell Casey he was doing great, and to ask if he wanted a break before continuing; mostly the answer was no, but there were a couple of pieces of shot that had gone deeper than the others. Once MacCready heard Casey’s fingernails scraping on the floorboards below, he knew it was time for a rest.

He sat back on his heels, wiping the blood off the tweezers, and watched Casey’s body sag with relief. Then he jumped as Casey suddenly pushed himself up on his elbows - if he had looked pale before, now he looked milk-white, eyes and the smudge of blood dark on his skin.

“You okay?”

“Think I’m gonna barf.”

MacCready pushed himself up off the floor and looked around for a bucket while Casey breathed slowly through his nose, eyes squeezed shut. He abandoned his search when he heard Casey flop back onto the sleeping bag.

“Case? You good?” For a moment he thought he’d passed out, but one of Casey’s hands waved feebly, and then flopped back down to join the rest of him. MacCready came and knelt down where he had been before, and reached over to his pack.

“Hey,” he said once he’d found what he was looking for. “Drink this, it’ll help,” he told Casey, twisting the top off the bottle of Nuka Cherry and holding it out for Casey to take. Casey propped himself up again and wrapped his fingers around the bottle, but couldn’t seem to take the weight of it in his sweating, shaking hands.

“Okay, hold on.” MacCready took the bottle back and shuffled up to sit near Casey’s head, pulling him gently into his lap.

“How romantic,” said Casey, in what would have been a snarky tone if he’d had more energy. Instead it came out as a croak, but MacCready heard its intended meaning anyway. He felt a flare of irritation, and stamped it back down.

“Shut up and drink it you ass,” he ordered, holding the bottle up to Casey’s lips. He figured that if he was as brusque about it as possible, maybe it would make Casey’s current weakness easier for him to bear. Casey did as he was told, throat moving as he swallowed.

“Feel better?” MacCready asked, as he shuffled back down to Casey’s leg.

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” He had been about to add that they were around two thirds done, but reconsidered, not sure if he would have wanted to hear that if their situations had been reversed. _Only two thirds?_ “Tell me if you want me to stop for a while, okay?”

“Yeah.”

It felt awful, seeing Casey in so much pain. Normally gregarious - sometimes to the point of annoying - Casey could never sit still; and if he had to sit still, then he could never shut up. Now he was lying here, unmoving except the too-fast rise and fall of his chest, the few jokes he’d managed to make feeble ones, made utterly unfunny by the sheer amount of his blood all over everything. It hurt MacCready’s heart, knowing he was suffering like this. It was near impossible not to compare the situation to the D.C. subway too, now that his mind could let his hands get on with their job without needing to interfere too much. The difference between then and now was that now, there was something he could do to help - something that Lucy would have approved of, if she could have seen him. Been proud of him for even, maybe.

_I guess it didn’t all go in one ear and out the other after all, huh RJ?_

More bloodied ball bearings hit the floor; absently, MacCready knew he’d have to pick them all up before one of them tripped, but they were currently more of a problem inside Casey so he fixed that first. He blinked away tiredness, and suddenly wondered how long he’d been doing this. An hour? Two? It couldn’t have been later than four when they’d stumbled in here, and looking through the grimy window, he could see that the sun was starting to sink below the horizon. He scrubbed the surviving arm of his duster over his face.

“You doin’ okay, Case?”

A hand appeared at the edge of his vision, thumb pointing skyward.

“Not many more left,” MacCready told him, and received a sigh in response.

He continued, having to peer closer and closer in the fading light. Part of him couldn’t help but be aware of how close he was having to lean toward Casey’s crotch, but there was nothing else to be done. Needs must, and he could be embarrassed about it later. Finally, he looked the leg over to make sure he hadn’t missed any bearings and sat back, stretching out his aching shoulders.

“Okay, I got ‘em all, but don’t get excited yet,” MacCready told him. “I have to rinse all this out with alcohol, and that is gonna be even less fun than the last part.”

Casey mumbled something that might have contained the words ‘bedside manner’, and might not.

“Sorry, cowboy, it’s just the way it is. You wanna get it over with, or take a break first?”

“Do it,” Casey managed. He looked utterly wrung out, too tired to open his eyes.

“Okay,” said MacCready, and picked up the bottle of vodka.

“I know, I know, I’m sorry,” he crooned as Casey spasmed and jerked as the alcohol burned over the wounds, pain too sharp to even give voice to. MacCready caught sight of his face, twisted with burning agony, lips pulled back tight over his teeth; he closed his eyes against it, but too late. He’d be seeing _that_ in his dreams for a while too. He smoothed a hand over the skin below the wound, just above Casey’s knee. “It’s okay, it’s done, you’re okay,” he repeated, reassuring himself as much as Casey.

When Casey finally stopped twitching and lay still, MacCready opened his eyes again. “You still with me, Case?” He asked softly.

“Yeah.” Casey’s mouth was pressed tight into a thin line, but his colour was looking better. Not healthy, not by a long stretch, but a few inches further back from death’s door. MacCready used some more of the vodka to wash the worst of the blood off his hands. There would be reddish-brown crescents under his nails for weeks.

“You want a smoke?” He asked, as he wiped them dry.

“Fuck yeah.”

Casey’s fingers shook as he accepted the cigarette, but it seemed to erase some of the hardness that the pain had drawn on his face. “Is there any more Nuka Cherry?” He asked, in a more normal tone of voice than MacCready had heard from him in hours. The words scratched as they came out, and Casey pressed a hand to his throat and cleared it.

“Yeah, hold on.” MacCready found a second bottle and opened it, handing it over; the sugar would do him a world of good. This time Casey managed to hold it on his own.

“Thank you,” he said, after a few sips. “For… Everything. All of this.”

MacCready shrugged, too tired to affect modesty. “Hey, you’d have done the same,” he told him.

“I wouldn’t know how.”

They smoked in silence for a while, MacCready leaning over from time to time to see if the vodka had evaporated yet, and whether it would be safe to remove the tourniquet. Casey’s injured leg was looking a lot paler than the other one, and he couldn’t leave it on forever.

“Let’s take a look at that,” he said, nodding at the sleeve finally, and pitching his cigarette into the fire. Casey did the same, and lay back. Then, frowning, he sat up again.

“Is that the sleeve from your coat?” He asked, pointing at the bloody scrap of cloth, and seeming to notice MacCready’s bare arm for the first time.

“Yeah,” MacCready told him. “Was all I had to hand.”

“I don’t even remember you doing that,” Casey mused, lying back down.

“There’s probably a lot of stuff from this afternoon that’s better if you don’t remember it,” said MacCready.

“I concur.”

MacCready untied the tourniquet slowly, watching for sudden spurts of crimson, but none came. He hadn’t been exactly sure what they would have done if there had been any, and tried not to make his relief too obvious when there wasn’t.

“Owwwwww,” said Casey, doing his Deacon impression, which meant that it hurt a lot less than most of the rest of what he’d been through today. That was a good sign. He let MacCready place a gentle hand under his knee and lift it to wrap the bandage around, firm but not too tight, and watched as he worked.

“Okay,” said MacCready, sitting back on his heels. “You’re done.”

“Not as done as I would have been without you,” said Casey, and MacCready knew that if he looked at him, he would feel his cheeks start to stain red; so he didn’t.

“Eh, blood always makes more of itself. It would have sucked, but I doubt you’d have died,” he lied, eyes firmly on his own hands. The silence stretched on after that, and MacCready would almost have welcomed the arrival of more supermutants, just to fill it. Almost.

“Well, either way… Thank you,” said Casey at last. “I owe you. I just have one last thing to ask, though, can you help me up? I really have to piss.”

The laugh barked out of MacCready’s throat, surprising him almost as much as Casey’s request. “Sure.”

It took a while and a lot of false starts but Casey was finally on his feet, in underwear and socks and one arm thrown over MacCready’s shoulders. They shuffled slowly outside and around the side of the building into an alley, where MacCready propped him up against the wall.

“You got it from here?” He asked, making an effort to keep his tone light. To his relief, Casey winked.

“Yeah, I got it.”

MacCready nodded, and retreated back to the front of the building to keep watch. “Call me when you’re done,” he called back over his shoulder as he left. He started to whistle tunelessly once he reached the front of the building; once it had been something he’d heard on Diamond City Radio, but it was probably unrecognisable by the time it escaped his lips. It didn’t matter, he wasn’t doing it to entertain anyone.

Looking up at the front of the building he realised it had once been a storefront; the wooden sign still hung above the door, aged paint brown and peeling. What was left wasn’t enough to tell him what kind of store it had been, however. He watched the street, accidentally caught sight of the place where Casey had lain when he had been shot, and looked away. That was a lot of blood. He didn’t care what Lucy would have said about it not being as much as it seemed. MacCready would be lucky if he didn’t get more nightmares over this, to join the ones he had already.

“Hey,” said a voice behind him, making him jump. He turned to see Casey standing in the mouth of the alleyway beside the building, leaning heavily against the wall. He looked pale and skinny and wrung out, a shadow of his tall, comfortingly solid self.

“I told you to call me,” MacCready chided, as he got his shoulder under Casey’s arm and took his weight.

“I’m fine. What was that you were whistling, by the way?” Casey asked, as he let MacCready help him back inside.

“Oh, I don’t know. Just something I heard on the radio.”

“Was it Halloween?” Casey asked slyly.

“Eat a di… Shut up.” He grinned in spite of himself, when Casey laughed.


End file.
